This prairie wakeboarding girl actually sold last night.  The buyer used the keyword "ski" to find this forgotten (rarely downloaded) shot from last summer.   I like the photo; parallel lines pull attention to a pretty surfer girl in the middle of the prairie with no water in sight.  But of what use is a photo like this to a microstock buyer?  There is certainly no concept here other than "out of place" perhaps.  Youth?  Adventure?  Maybe all she needs is a suitcase by her side to signify the beginning of a journey. Looking back, this shot would have been a better fit with Alamay or the now-defunct PhotoShelter than with the micros.  It's just a little too "artsy" (if you can call it that) to be useful to designers.

Selling in the micros is all about volume.  You don't want your photos to sell a few times, you want them to sell hundreds of times.  You need strong themes that are relevant to today, isolated shots that are easy to drop into a layout, or photos with uncluttered backgrounds and plenty of copy space.

Selling in the micros is also a little bit about luck.  If your photo arrives at a time when it is favoured by the search engine gods and gets immediate sales it should have a pretty good life.  If it sticks on page 10 of new searches instead of page 1 it may simply die.

My prairie surfer girl has enjoyed views, but few sales.  She really has little to sell.  Although many other shots taken during this session have been fairly successful, she has become one of those photos that sells a few times a year and makes up a portion of my Long Tail earnings.

I haven't crunched my own numbers, but I appear to be "normal" (insert laughter here); about 20% of my portfolio earns about 80% of my income.   But what about those photos that rarely ever sell?   As a body of work grows to a  larger mass, these infrequent sales can become quite significant.  A company like Amazon, for example, sells millions of niche books just a few times each year. 

The collective group of small earners can become pretty significant to your sales each months, and we can't exclude the small agencies who at the bottom of your prioritized submission list.   Fotolia, Bigstock, 123rf and  StockXpert don't bring me a lot of money each month, and many times I wonder why I bother, but at the end of the year they do add up to almost 20% of my microstock earnings.

As important as my Long Tail is at the end of the month, I'll save future shots like the one above one for Alamay where it still won't sell very often, but when it does it will be for a higher value.  I want all my microstock photos to sell hundreds of times, not just a few.